Cinema Suicide

I realize that I started this blog with movies in mind, but I’m a fan of horror culture as a whole. While I’ll definitely keep book reports largely under the responsibility of other horror lit blogs, I’m not above dropping a recommendation or two on my readership.

My sister got me this book for Christmas last year and I’ve been sitting on it, along with a pile of other books I have intended to read since even further back. I enjoy reading quite a bit but I will shamefully admit to you that I don’t read often. There’s a reason for that, but with my wife in the throes of agony during the final few weeks of her pregnancy, we’re going to bed earlier so she can stretch out and relax. To kill the time that would otherwise be occupied by television (such an exciting life we lead), she’s catching up on Harry Potter before the final book in the series comes out. To give myself something to do while I keep her company in bed, I picked up this book. I’m not terribly far into it but it really surprised the hell out of me and struck a particular chord. So here I am to tell you about it and probably to explain my enduring love affair with the extremely played out zombie subgenre.

Max Brooks is the son of comedy legend Mel Brooks. He was a writer for SNL and a handful of other shows. He is also a man after my own heart. He and I have probably spent as much time considering the zombie apocalypse. At first, the fantasy began as something very close to Dawn of the Dead. It was a zombie stomping adventure full of guns and endless survival resources. We thought only about that sweet middle part where the survivors sweep the mall with the greatest of ease and we conveniently left out the part where marauders raid our stronghold, steal our shit and then leave us vulnerable to the horde whereupon everything goes wrong and our house of cards topples. Over time, though, the fantasy becomes a lot more complicated. We begin to consider the zombie apocalypse in real-world terms. Guns become secondary weapons, great when you have the resources to support them, but dead weight when you run out of bullets. Cars become a burden because the impending panic and collapse of society is going to turn roads and highways into parking lots and gas a scarce commodity. Barricading yourself in becomes the worst thing you can do because you’re going to run out of food. Electricity will eventually stop, water will stop running, the food in the fridge will spoil, you’re going to have to leave sooner or later or die of starvation in the basement. These were all concepts Brooks examined in his first novelty book, The Zombie Survival Guide, a fun book to have around and show your friends when they stumble on it while looking over your bookshelf, but ultimately not a book you can really read.

World War Z takes the zombie setting and presents it as though it’s a retrospective piece of nonfiction. It takes place an unspecified number of years after a zombie plague outbreak greatly reduces the world population and is then brought under control. While it’s certainly a pulpy read and presented in a series of interviews with fictional survivors, it goes at the setting from the perspective of an author who studied at the same school of the living dead that I did. Under the masterful tutelage of George A. Romero. Nobody has or probably ever will do a zombie movie like Romero. Brooks presents a global zombie catastrophe the same way Romero might do it in Pittsburgh. World War Z has the same underlying social context that makes Romero zombie movies so unique. Here, the lead-up to the outbreak is handled in the same way that pre-9-11 intelligence was reported in the months and years following 9-11. That is to say that alleged knowledge of Al Qaeda’s attack was casually ignored in favor of the bigger, more conventional target (Iraq). In this story, Israeli intelligence officers arranged a report based on intercepted Chinese communications, alarming reports out of South Africa and a handful of other small-time reports of a plague outbreak, walking dead and cannibalism yet most world governments, in particular, the US government, chose to ignore the report until it was too late. The set up and advancement of the plot is handled as well as Romero when he was at the top of his game. While I certainly don’t want to put this on a pedestal next to Dawn of the Dead, realize that it’s pretty good. Apparently it’s in development to be a movie without Brooks’ involvement but is being written by J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame. I have high hopes.

In a time when seven no-budget zombie movies are released a month and the big Hollywood zombie wave has already crashed, it’s nice to see a piece of that culture happen that actually “gets it”. After the fiasco that was Land of the Dead and Zack Snyder’s exciting but ultimately empty Dawn of the Dead remake, you start to get the feeling that everyone who claimed to grow up on Romero zombies completely missed the point. They’d probably be more comfortable with Fulci zombies since those ones don’t ask you to think too much. Zombies are largely a cinematic affair. I’ve seen a few zombie novels around but they never seem to strike as something I should read. The monster just doesn’t translate to books very well. As was with Romero’s zombie movies, the zombies are very much a part of the setting while the human drama in the foreground is the real story, World War Z tells the story from the perspective of living people struggling to survive in a horror movie world that blends too closely with the real world. The zombies are just set dressing, the real stars of the story are the people telling the story. It’s amazing to me how tightly Brooks grasps everything that makes Romero zombie movies so great AND translates it perfectly to the written word.

Many of the interviews put you there as the proverbial shit is hitting the fan and it’s a surprisingly gripping read. This comes highly recommended.

Order World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War at Amazon now!

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